The FRONTLINE Interviews

Valarie Kaur

Civil Rights Activist

Valarie Kaur is a civil rights activist, lawyer and filmmaker. She is the author of See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Gabrielle Schonder on May 14, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

America After 9/11

TOP

Valarie Kaur

Chapters

Text Interview:

Highlight text to share it

Reaction to 9/11

I want to ask you about President [George W.] Bush at Ground Zero with the bullhorn that day.He says to the crowd, "I can hear you, the world can hear you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."And I'm curious to know what you believe he was saying in that moment.

I remember the night of 9/11.President Bush addressed our nation at large and declared a war on terrorism.He divided the world into "us" and "them;" you are either with us or against us.And I remember thinking that one cannot grieve and prepare to kill at the same time.We were robbed of the ability to sit with our grief, to process our grief.Unresolved grief inside of an individual is tragic, but unresolved grief in a nation is catastrophic.It releases enormous aggression.The war on terror that began with Afghanistan, then expanded across two decades, three presidencies, 76 countries, cost trillions of dollars and cost 1 million lives, that aggression also led to a resurgence of the white nationalist movement that would come to overtake the highest offices of the land.

So yes, I believe that the world we live in today is shaped by the choices that were made in the wake of 9/11.Our nation, our people chose to divide the world into "us" and "them," good and evil, and our government responded in such a way that initiated a constriction of civil and human rights that was so powerful that it continues 20 years later.And a new generation is barely aware that it could be otherwise.

The Mission in Afghanistan

We’re going to go into Afghanistan less than a month after the attack, and I wonder, did you think we were seeking revenge?What were we doing?

There are so many ways to answer this.President Bush went into Afghanistan declaring that we were bringing justice to our enemies, but I believe that this was more than self-defense.This was satisfying the nation's need for vengeance, for visible redemption in the form of bloodshed.

And we know this to be true, because it wasn't long before the government successfully exchanged one Muslim target for another, shifting our focus from Afghanistan to Iraq.The nation, the government was able to enact a longstanding agenda for regime change that began in Afghanistan but continued to Iraq and then fueled our presence in countries all across the world. …

We were promised that this would be quick and swift delivery of justice.We were promised "Mission Accomplished."We were promised that this would bring stability to the region and safety for the United States, and none of those promises were ever delivered.It has only caused more bloodshed.It has only caused more instability.It has only spurned—it has only inspired more acts of terror.

And so, you know, going back to the decisions that were made in the wake of 9/11, imagine if the nation responded differently.This is what I want to say: It did not have to be this way.It did not have to be this way.History is littered with the wreckage of mass violence on a scale of 9/11, but 9/11 was the first tragedy that was a globally televised experience.The world at large condemned 9/11.The world at large poured its goodwill into us.What would have happened if we had not squandered that goodwill?

Imagine if today we could look back on 9/11 and say that it initiated an era of global cooperation and peace instead of an era of global warfare.

Guantanamo

I wonder if I can take you to this question of what to do with enemy combatants and Guantanamo Bay being opened.When those images are broadcast, can you help us understand the impact?

The Bush administration argued that Guantanamo was beyond the jurisdiction of the United States.It chose Guantanamo to hold detainees captured in the war on terror because it insisted that they were beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution.In other words, they detained people there so that they would not have the constitutional rights to contest their detention.Their argument was that these men were, quote/unquote, "the worst of the worst," a subhuman monster so savage that they would not be able to be protected by the laws of the civilized world.

And so we received images of men in cages, in orange suits, kneeling in the gravel, hands cuffed behind their backs, in hoods.And we accepted these images.We accepted the idea that some people were so monstrous that they were beyond the reach of human rights.

For years, the Bush administration held mostly Muslim men without charge or trial, and we let it happen.

Our federal courts were already set up to try people for terrorism.Our international law was already set up to manage prisoners of war.But the Bush administration insisted on creating new legal categories, more like legal black holes.The words of the Constitution simply don't fall into the sea.It took decades of lawyers, year after year, filing lawsuits to make sure that the detainees at Guantanamo would be protected by the work of the Constitution.And still, Guantanamo remains open.

I remember when President [Barack] Obama signed his executive order to close Guantanamo.Nine months later I was selected as a legal observer to travel to Guantanamo to observe the military commissions there.I thought I was going to be among the last visitors to ever set foot on Guantanamo where prisoners were still held.And here we are, and Guantanamo is still open.

I remember arriving at Guantanamo and being shocked by what I saw.Guantanamo is beautiful.There are rolling green hills and blue waters and—there's a Starbucks on Guantanamo and a McDonald's and a paintball center, an outdoor tennis court, movie theaters, and it feels like a cross between small-town America and a Caribbean seaside resort.And just over the hills, there are detention centers where we have people in indefinite detention, where people have been subject to all forms of torture, to forced feedings, to sleep deprivation, waterboarding.We've received reports of suicides and homicides.The list goes on.And yet we've created a culture on Guantanamo that makes such atrocities feel normal.

I remember sitting in the Irish pub at Guantanamo writing about what I was seeing when a solider plopped down in front of me and said, "I see you judging us.But you don't know what I know, that we are the prisoners here, that the detainees get more freedom than we do."And I remember just feeling so enraged, hearing his insistence that he was the true prisoner here, until I began to ask him his story.He was a young man who enlisted in the war in order to find meaning after 9/11, in order to serve his country.He felt betrayed; he felt lost.I looked around, and I realized that all the soldiers here were rotated in batches.They were all so young, 18, 19, 20.

I remember visiting Guantanamo and being struck by how young the soldiers were.I remember sitting at the military commission hearing for Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was captured in Afghanistan and taken to Guantanamo.He had come of age in Guantanamo.And here I was, a law student, and I realized that the prisoner, the guard, the soldiers and the witness, that all of us were so young, that we had not created Guantanamo; we had inherited it.And isn't that how oppression works?It captures new generations and assigns us different roles.

And so I believe that our generation has not only inherited Guantanamo, we have inherited Guantanamos.And it is up to us now to decide which institutions are so monstrous that they must be dismantled, they must be reimagined.And perhaps this is the moment, on a 20-year anniversary, to make those choices now, to reimagine how it could be otherwise.

I'm wondering if looking back, what did it mean that we fought for democratic institutions with undemocratic methods?

The way we make change is just as important as the change we make.

We cannot use torture and waterboarding and homicides and indefinite detention abroad.We cannot use arrests and detentions and deportations and registrations and surveillance at home.We cannot allow hate violence to continue on our soil and couple it with state violence and with the wars on—abroad, all thinking that this is the means justifying the ends.

Twenty years later, we have proof, don't we, that these undemocratic means to produce a stable and democratic world fail.But the way we make change is just as important as the change we make.

Let me ask you about the impact here at home, especially with the torture revelations, what it did to our understanding of trust.

I remember when the news about Abu Ghraib first broke out, and I thought, this is the watershed moment.This is the moment that will expose the torture and the injustice, the oppression that is taking place in these [CIA] black sites, these military detention centers all across the world at the leadership of the United States.Perhaps this will bring the war to an end.And instead, what it did is it just increased our ability to stomach atrocities done on people who we decided were less than human, who deserved it, who were beyond a circle of who counts as worthy of dignity.

So I think the damage that has been done with all the ways our nation has responded to 9/11 has not just been legal or political.It has been spiritual; it has been moral.It has torn at the fabric of who we are and who we want to be.

On the 20-year anniversary of 9/11, I think there is no better redemption than to decide to make different choices.If we divided the world into us and them, at home and abroad, what might it mean for us today to decide to center human dignity above all; to choose to make choices out of the ethic of love; to see all human beings as part of our family; to say no atrocity is worth our own illusion of security?What would it mean to begin to imagine a world where we see no stranger?

Imagine, Gabrielle, if the choices we made in the wake of 9/11 shaped the world we live in today, what are the choices we could make today that shape the world 20 years from now?

Colin Powell and Weapons of Mass Destruction

Let me take you back to a very different period, which is when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell goes to the U.N. and sells the war on Iraq based on the lies of weapons of mass destruction.I wonder if you can help me understand, again, the domestic implications of that.Here's one of the most trusted officials in [the Bush] administration making this case—what that would do here at home.

Many believed that we just didn't know better, that based on the intelligence that we had at the time, the best thing we could have done was to go to war with Iraq to protect ourselves, this idea of preemptive war.But if you had just read the Knight Ridder articles that were released during that period of time, those news pieces that were so easy to access for us as college students but were hard to access for the rest of the country when it came to mass mainstream media that was following this rush to go to war, if you had read those articles with us, and it was clear, long before the war began in 2003, that the justification for the war was weak at best and fabricated at worst.¹

HuffPost: The Reporting Team That Got Iraq Right

And so those of us who were reading these articles, who knew that these leaders, like Colin Powell, who were presenting the argument for war, were trying to stretch themselves in order to justify what the government wanted, what the president wanted, if—those of us who knew better, we flooded the streets.We were part of a global antiwar movement.I was one of the students leading the antiwar protests in the Bay Area.On the day the war began, there were 2,200 people arrested in San Francisco protesting the war.And we didn't stop.We continued to stage civil disobedience, hoping, praying that our actions would matter.But the war went on.And not just a few years or 10 years, but 20 years later it went on!

Sometimes I wonder what good our protest was.And I look back, and I think there is one difference between then and now.And perhaps because we stood up and because we lifted our voices and because we said no, solidarity is everything, there are more people awake now, awake today than there were before.There are more people standing in solidarity with us—Muslim, Sikh, Asian Americans who are subject to state violence and hate violence—than ever before.There are more people who are calling for a new administration to make different choices, to protect us in ways that still affirm dignity for all.There are more of us now who want an end to the war on terror, who want us to make choices that might lead to safety, not just for the United States but for the countries we've been at war at.That's the one thing that gives me hope.

Let me ask you a little bit here about when people of color began to lose faith in government institutions in this period.Is that something you can help us understand?

So let me offer you this, that Muslim, Sikh, Asian Americans, we have been subject to hate violence before 9/11.I remember after the Iran hostage crisis, after the first Persian Gulf War, after the Oklahoma City bombing, there were waves of hate violence that impacted our communities, but nothing on the scale and scope that we saw after 9/11.The wave of hate violence after 9/11 was remarkable because it never returned to the levels before 9/11.Twenty years later, our communities are five times more likely to be targets of hate than we were before 9/11.

Twenty years later, our communities are five times more likely to be targets of hate than we were before 9/11.That wave of hate violence after 9/11 was quickly followed by state violence.The state decided to enact arrests, detentions, deportations, registration, surveillance that impacted, that criminalized Muslim and immigrant communities.

Again and again, the government cast a wide net, curtailing civil liberties, terrorizing our communities with very little to show for it.

And every time it did, it sent a signal to the public who it was acceptable to hate.State violence and hate violence have always been tethered in the United States for Black people, for Indigenous people, for Asian people, and for Muslim and Sikh Americans, for South Asian Americans.It has been—it has meant feeling unsafe in our own country.

So that meant that for many South Asian and Asian Americans who had put their faith in government to protect them, for many of them, that faith crumbled in the years after 9/11.That faith particularly crumbled for the Republican Party.

My father was a passionate Republican.He put his faith in government.He voted for President Bush twice.But as the news around Abu Ghraib and as the hate violence and the state violence went on, as he saw his own family, his own community, his own daughter subject to police brutality and atrocious state practices, that is when he began not just to lose faith but to wake up, to wake up to the reality that our government and this party were not protecting us because it did not see us as equal Americans.I think that happened for many, many people in these communities.

I'm going to take you into the Obama years, because I want to know your take on what he was offering that was different than the way President Bush had handled Iraq and Afghanistan in those early days.

We were so hopeful with the Obama era.I was one of many who campaigned for Obama and really believed in his vision of hope and change, and I took that vision to mean a clean break from Bush-era policies.

His first day of office, he signs an executive order to close Guantanamo. We took that as a signal for a clean break with Bush-era policies.What was troubling then to witness was a continuation of many of those policies.

I remember serving as a clerk on the Senate Judiciary Committee that summer, in that first year that Obama was president, and feeling so troubled by how much we had to argue against indefinite detention and other policies that the Bush administration had championed.

The Obama administration's willingness to continue so many of those policies made it so that the Bush era was not an aberration.The policies in the Bush era simply enacted a contraction of civil and human rights so powerful that it was continued by subsequent administrations.

There was a deep sense of loss and betrayal here, yeah.And Gabrielle, it's really this sense that it's beyond political party, which is why my work has turned so much to that spiritual and moral fabric that both parties have been complicit in supporting, sustaining the war on terror and fueling hate violence at home and driving the racial profiling and state violence.

I wonder if you can speak to the loss of life.I'm thinking of civilian life in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the impact here at home of seeing those images over the years on television, on the internet, what the impact is of that, that it's sort of this constant.

The consequence of endless faraway war is desensitizing a population to endless faraway suffering.It comes home when we see the coffins of our own soldier arrive in our own communities.My high school in California lost more soldiers in the war on terror than any other high school in the country at one point.²

Los Angeles Times: Wars take a heavy toll on one California school

And so we've had to tell us ourselves a story that justifies their loss.And we've had to tell ourselves a story that justifies the suffering and the killing of civilians abroad.If we choose to see those civilians as less than American, as less than human, then it becomes easier to stomach those images, doesn't it?But if we choose to see those mothers as our own mothers, those children as our own children, then it must inspire us, ignite us to act.

I think what we need now is—a sound government is necessary, but it is not sufficient to transition this country and this world.What we need is a shift in culture and consciousness, a revolution of the heart, a new way of seeing and being that leaves no one behind.That's what I call revolutionary love.Through the eyes of revolutionary love and those images that we have been so desensitized to, of suffering abroad, would not ignite us into complacency but unite us into action.

Something that you handle quite well in your book is the distrust that expands in the country under Obama in the form of the Tea Party movement, which we've covered extensively.But I wonder if you can help us fit it into this post-9/11 anger and the beliefs that seem to be building out there underneath the Obama presidency that perhaps we're not paying as close attention to and perhaps that White House isn't.

So let me start with after 9/11.In the wake of 9/11, in response to all of that hate violence, there was bipartisan condemnation of hate crimes.There were Republican leaders standing up to speak their solidarity with Muslim communities.I mean, it was contradicted by the state practices that targeted and criminalized those very communities, but at least there was this spoken recognition that hate against Muslim Americans was wrong, was immoral.That changed under the Obama era.

We saw the rise of a multimillion-dollar anti-Muslim propaganda machine that supported think tanks and bloggers and films and propaganda materials.At that point, Republicans inside the party were realizing that they would be able to score political points if they were vilifying Muslim Americans, and that fed into the anti-Blackness that was able to become very explicit under the Obama era as well.

So the white nationalist rage that was on the margins of the Republican Party during the Bush era was allowed to become mainstream during the Obama era.There was structure given to it, funding behind it, campaigning around it, so that by the time President [Donald] Trump runs for office, there's an entire army of white nationalists who are ready to unfurl a banner to "Make America Great Again."

All of that happened—the emergence of this white nationalist movement really took form in the aftermath of 9/11 and was allowed to become mainstream in those Obama years.

The Rise of Donald Trump

I wonder if you can help us understand how Trump using the language of 9/11 in this period that we've been discussing, it's being infused into his political campaigns.This is the Muslim ban; this is the reference to radical Islamic terrorism.

President Trump took the anti-Muslim rhetoric, the anti-Muslim sentiment, the anti-Muslim policies of his predecessors and weaponized them against his own people in our own country in order to advance a white nationalist agenda.So the Muslim bans, the racial profiling, the family separation policies, all of what he enacted under his administration had precedent in how our nation responded to 9/11.But it was taken to a new level that criminalized and terrorized entire communities that had long been terrorized, but now at a new scale.

How much of what happens on Jan.6 can we see as a result of all the mistakes and the lies starting at 9/11?

I see a direct line from the choices we made after 9/11 to the insurrection on Jan. 6.The choices we made after 9/11 were about dividing the world into us and them, and who was the "us"?It was the beginning of this white nationalist identity, this idea that America was white; that cultural, political, economic dominion belonged to white people of a certain class.It was only a matter of time before that white nationalist rage became cannibalistic.What were the insurrectionists trying to do that day?They were storming the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power to a diverse coalition of leadership that would see someone like me and my family as part of this country.As the nation becomes more and more multiracial, multifaith, it was only a matter of time before that white nationalism became cannibalistic, attacked the very seat of power that once gave it authority.

I believe that our nation is in transition now; that within the next 25 years, we know that the number of people of color on this soil will exceed the number of white people for the first time since colonization.And we are at a crossroads.Will we continue to descend into a kind of civil war, a power struggle with those who wish to return America to a past where only a certain class of white people hold dominion?Or will we begin to birth a nation that has never been—a nation made up of other nations; a nation that is truly multiracial, multifaith, where power is shared, where we strive to protect the dignity and the wellness of every single person?Is this the darkness of the tomb or the darkness of the womb?

I believe our America is a nation still waiting to be born, and I believe that we can labor for that America.And I believe that the choices that we made in the last 20 years, if we can reckon with those choices, if we can face the blood that has been spilled and the suffering that has been caused in the last 20 years, we can decide how we want to make choices differently now, to labor for that America that has never been.Can we give birth to a multiracial democracy?We can't if we continue on the path we've been on the last 20 years.We can if we all choose to show up to belabor differently for the next 20 years.

Latest Interviews

Get our Newsletter

Stay Connected

Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation

Koo and Patricia Yuen

Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.